Love of lathes.

[camallison]

The other thing that happened when production moved offshore was that overseas companies were allowed to manufacture under licence for their domestic consumption only. Gradually, they showed the company that granted that licence that their production could be done cheaper in the overseas plant. Fast forward a decade and the UK company has significant lead times with their official product, but knock-off product starts to trickle in to fill the vacuum left. This happened to a sister company of mine in the 90s who produced large actuators for the water industry. These were large electric motors with beefy gearboxes. Licensed manufacture was allowed in China and India on condition that no production was exported. Sure enough, knock-offs appeared and, on a visit to Shenzhen to check our licensee of electronic products, I happened to call in at the other (actuator) plant only to see the knock-off product being assembled on the same line as the original.

This has also happened with small generators - Kipor is the knock-off of a Honda generator, but certainly doesn't have the quality.

Colin